New Zealand kiwifruit marketer Zespri will launch a new multi-media campaign in India next week that will include its first-ever TV commercials in the country fronted by Bollywood child actor Harshaali Malhotra.
India remains a relatively small market in terms of kiwifruit consumption, but it has been growing rapidly off a low base for Zespri, and the company is targeting significant expansion there this year.
Zespri is aiming to ship a record 1.5m trays of Green kiwifruit, up from more than 1m trays last year. It is also seeking to double it sales of SunGold kiwifruit to 200,000 trays.
The new multi-media campaign aims to ramp up awareness of kiwifruit and the Zespri brand with Malhrota – who starred in Bajrangi Bhaijaan –helping to boost the appeal to adults as well as children.
“Zespri is very exciting to associated with Muni (Harshaali Malhotra) as her sweet and endearing persona fits perfectly with our brand,” Zespri’s India country head and marketing manager Ritesh Bhimani said in a media statement. “There is much clutter in the fruit market and it is imperative for us to connect with children and parents across the country to emphasise the delicious taste of Zespri kiwifruit along with the abundant health benefits.”
Zespri will work with the child actor to emphasise the right way of eating kiwifruit in a simple three-part process – ‘Cut, scoop and enjoy’.
Convenient packaging of kiwifruit in three-piece punnets is playing a key role to boost the penetration of the fruit in India. Daniel Mathieson, Zespri’s global president of sales and marketing, who was in India this week to help launch the campaign, told Asiafruit the TV and social media activities would be integrated with the on-pack messages to maximise the effect.
“We hope to reinforce the message [Harshaali is conveying] through the pre-packs of kiwifruit that we’ll be supplying into many of the hundreds of thousands of small fruit vendors across India,” said Mathieson. “We’ll connect what people see on TV and online with the pre-packs at point-of-sale.”
Mathieson said the smaller unit sizes offered by pre-pack punnets were helping to drive sales to India’s millions of specialist fruit vendors. “They can now take kiwifruit in three-piece punnets rather than having to buy whole trays,” he said. “Our distributors here in India have also invested in pre-packing facilities to service this demand.”
Zespri’s New Zealand kiwifruit campaign kicked of around three weeks ago – later than usual, with good uptake reported for Green kiwifruit in particular.
“We’ve had strong demand for Green,” said Mathieson. “The hot conditions in India make things more difficult for SunGold because of the broken cold chain. With SunGold, it’s all about awareness –it’ll be challenging until we get demand up to a level where there is a faster turnover of product.”
